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Thought Process: OG Switch
Woot currently has a deal up for a brand new OLED Switch for $250. The sale is going until June 18th, or until they sell out, the latter of which seems more likely. Should I pull the trigger?
First question: why?
It’s a good question. For one thing, the Switch 2 just came out and it costs “only” $450. Right now, there aren’t very many actual Switch 2 games beyond Mario Kart World, so no real killer apps. Also, I have clearly sat out the entirety of the Switch’s original lifespan, so why jump in now? Also also, the Switch Lite appears to retail for around $180ish, which is even less, if it were somehow super important for me to play Switch games. Then again, $70 is probably reasonably enough to justify an OLED upgrade plus being able to dock it to a TV.
Not for nothing, the Retroid Pocket 5 can be bought from Amazon for $260. It would be even cheaper if not for the tariffs. It can emulate everything up through Gamecube, and even a few Switch titles. However, the process by which one acquires emulation-ready Switch games is the same for just playing them on the PC, so the only real benefit of one over the other is for gaming on the go. Which, as it turns out, I generally don’t do.
Second question: what would I play?
There are a few titles that immediately come to mind:
- Zelda: Breath of the Wild
- Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
- Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
- …?
When I was trying to think about the last Mario game I played, I realized that I hadn’t played one for a long time. The last Nintendo console I bought was Gamecube back in my college days, but it was primarily to play Super Smash Bros Melee and Mario Kart Double Dash. So, Super Mario… Sunshine, I never played. Nor Galaxy or Galaxy 2. Presumably they would be fun. But fun enough to justify $40 purchases of decades-old games? Ehhhh. Nintendo does have a subscription feature with classic games to play, but the Gamecube offerings right now are like 3 games (only for Switch 2).
Final question: what will I do?
After a long, exhaustive mental exercise, the answer is… Nothing. I will do nothing. I am not super convinced the OLED Switch will get any less expensive in the future, but that does not seem to matter much to me. Which makes sense, given all of my other gaming “obligations.” If anything, I would be more inclined for the Switch 2 simply because Mario Kart World does seem fun, and it’s backwards compatible, etc. Or the Retroid Pocket 5, honestly.
Or I can just continue to do waffle and whaff and do nothing until/unless some other solution releases that makes things more obviously clear. Like maybe a Steam Deck 2 or something.
RG35XXSP
In what I like to imagine as an Ocean’s Eleven-style delivery, my Anbernic RG35XXSP (hereafter SP) arrived to its new home two weeks or so ago with its then-current sales price intact, e.g. no surprise tariffs. Unfortunately for anyone currently reading this, Anbernic is suspending shipments to the US. They supposedly have a warehouse in the US they can ship from, but for how long remains to be seen.
Anyway, here is the SP next to the Mini+:
There are plenty of Youtube videos out there with detailed analyses between the two, so I won’t get into that here. What I will say is that if I had to do it all over again… I would have gotten an emulator with a thumbstick. In probably a horizontal orientation. So… maybe just a Retroid Pocket 5.
To be clear, the main “problem” I have is probably N64 envy. When I was looking at the curated list of 100s of games from my youth, the first thing that came to mind to try was Super Mario Kart (SNES). While that was nice, it was also, well, extremely basic. Which, of course it was. So then I moved up to Super Mario Kart Advance (GBA) and that felt a bit better with more interesting tracks and items. And then I took a detour into Super Mario 64 and that… didn’t feel that great. It actually played just fine on the SP, but obviously you have to use the D-pad as an analog stick.
As a somewhat related aside, I’m not sure if this is a handheld issue or an emulator issue or something I’ve just forgotten about in the intervening decades, but holding down B to run and pressing A to jump while moving is… hard? Like, I’m talking in the original Super Mario Bros. If you let go of B in mid-air, you lose any momentum you have when you land, if not while airborne. Did we all just smoosh our thumb-meat inbetween those two buttons and rock it 45 degrees when you needed to jump? I’m tempted to change the controller scheme to add one of the shoulder buttons as a Run button.
Aside from Nintendo, one of the other games I have surprisingly been playing is Xenogears. At first, this felt a bit awkward on the SP considering Xenogears is a 3D game with a spinnable camera and even a jump button… until I realized that the PS1 didn’t have analog sticks either. Oh my. In any case, I’m not certain that I will continue playing Xenogears much on the handheld devices, specifically because when I have the opportunity to do so, I usually can’t have the sound cranked up. Probably half the nostalgia of these games – and especially Squaresoft ones – comes from the soundtrack, so it’s a big loss. All of which brings up my reminder about your use case for emulation. Bring some headphones, at least.
In any event, what I can say is that between the SP and the Mini+, I do prefer the SP. There is an argument that the SP might have a hinge problem in the future, but there is something deeply satisfying about being able to close the clamshell at a moment’s notice and forget about the device in your pocket without having to baby it. I bought the Mini+ with a carrying case, but at that point the “pocket portability” aspect is diminished. The SP is probably not good for my 6-year old who would undoubtedly just open and shut the lid a 1000 times absentmindedly, but it’s certainly safer from a screen point of view once he’s older.
In An Age 